Database Systems: Concepts, Design and Applications

10.2. Normalization

Normalization is a process of decomposing a set of relations with anomalies to produce smaller and well-structured relations that contain minimum or no redundancy. It is a formal process of deciding which attributes should be grouped together in a relation. Normalization provides the designer with a systematic and scientific process of grouping of attributes in a relation. Using normalization, any change to the values stored in the database can be achieved with the fewest possible update operations.

Therefore, the process of normalization can be defined as a procedure of successive reduction of a given collection of relational schemas based on their FDs and primary keys to achieve some desirable form of minimised redundancy, ...